It's pathetic to break a New Year's resolution before we even get to New Year's Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney's corrosive and nonsensical outbursts -- that I would treat them, more or less, like the pearls of wisdom one hears from homeless people sitting in bus shelters.But he is a former vice president, which gives him a big stage for his histrionic Rottweiler-in-Winter act. It is never a good idea to let widely disseminated lies and distortions go unchallenged. And the shrill screed that Cheney unloosed Wednesday is so full of outright mendacity that, well, my resolution will have to wait.But using a terrorist attack to seek political gain? I have a New Year's resolution to suggest for Cheney: Ahead of your quest for personal vindication, put country first.In a statement to Politico, Cheney seemed to be trying to provide talking points for opponents of the Obama administration who -- incredibly -- would exploit the Christmas Day terrorist attack for political gain. Cheney's broadside opens with a big lie, which he then repeats throughout. It is as if he believes that saying something over and over again, in a loud enough voice, magically makes it so.
"As I've watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war," Cheney begins.
Flat-out untrue.
The fact is that Obama has said many times that we are at war against terrorists. He said it as a candidate. He said it in his inaugural address: "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred." He has said it since.
As Cheney well knows, unless he has lost even the most tenuous grip on reality, Obama's commitment to warfare as an instrument in the fight against terrorism has won the president nothing but grief from the liberal wing of his party, with more certainly to come. Hasn't anyone told Cheney that Obama is sharply boosting troop levels in Afghanistan in an attempt to avoid losing a war that the Bush administration started but then practically abandoned?
Cheney knows this. But he goes on to use the big lie -- that Obama is "trying to pretend we are not at war" -- to bludgeon the administration on a host of specific issues. Here is the one that jumps out at me: The president, Cheney claims, "seems to think that if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won't be at war."
Interesting that Cheney should bring that up, because it now seems clear that the man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was given training -- and probably the bomb itself, which involved plastic explosives sewn into his underwear -- by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. It happens that at least two men who were released from Guantanamo appear to have gone on to play major roles as al-Qaeda lieutenants in Yemen. Who let these dangerous people out of our custody? They were set free by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
The former vice president expresses his anger that the Obama administration is bringing Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to trial in New York. Cheney is also angry that Obama does not use the phrase "war on terror" all the time, the way the Bush administration used to. But Obama just specifies that we're at war against a network of terrorists, on the sensible theory that it's impossible to wage war against a tactic.
Toward the end of his two-paragraph statement, Cheney goes completely off the rails and starts fulminating about how Obama is seeking "social transformation -- the restructuring of American society." Somehow, this is supposed to be related to the president's alleged disavowal of war -- which, of course, isn't real anyway. It makes you wonder whether Cheney is just feeding the fantasies of the paranoid right or has actually joined the tea-party fringe.
I can find reasons to criticize the administration's response to the Christmas Day attack. Obama and his team were slow off the mark. Their initial statements were weak. Obama shouldn't have waited three days to speak publicly, and when he did he should have shown some emotion.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Eugene Robinson: "Dick Cheney's lies about President Obama"
Eugene Robinson (WaPo):
"Kennedy Center Honors – Eddie Vedder My City of Ruins" (video)
positively Barack, video (02:31):
The Kennedy Center Honors were broadcast last night. Here is Eddie Vedder paying tribute to Bruce Springsteen.Howie P.S.: Here in my neighborhood (West Seattle) we claim Eddie as a resident, even though he has other domiciles, as well.
Updated: "Why Jane Hamsher and Howard Dean Can't Be Wrong"
UPDATE: "What House Dems are trying to get in exchange for public option"(Sam Stein-HuffPo).
Cenk Uygur (The Young Turks):
Cenk Uygur (The Young Turks):
Can Jane Hamsher or Howard Dean be wrong on the substance of policy issues? Of course!!! I don't think they often are, but recently there have been many progressives who have thought so. These were reasonable disagreements and everyone was within their full right to think Dean or Hamsher might not have gotten the balance right on any particular issue.So, why can't they be wrong?
Because even if you disagree with them, they're doing you a huge favor. If you're a strong progressive and you think Howard Dean has gone out too far left on health care reform or Jane Hamsher has attacked President Obama too hard from the left -- then, fantastic, you are now officially a moderate!
And more importantly, so is Obama.Real political pressure by definition involves the possibility of real political pain. If you're not willing to go that far, then in my humble opinion you are too risk averse to have any consequential role to play in current day politics. Politics is about power, if you don't ever wield it, then you're not really in the game.Why is this so important? I'm not sure you particularly want to be moderate, and I'm certainly not sure you are one. But that's not the point. The point is that the mainstream media loves people who they can call "moderates." If Joe Lieberman is somewhere between Obama and Cheney, no matter how far to the right he is, he gets to be called a moderate. Why? Because there's someone to the right of him.
Now, you have someone to the left of you. Congratulations, you made it! You're now part of the cool crowd in DC, the only people that the establishment media care about or give any credence to -- moderates.
I get thrown into the Hamsher category because I believe in attacking hard from the left. Some have started to call this the Uygur Doctrine, which, of course, I love. The reality is I'm a political moderate who until about a month ago believed we should stay longer in Afghanistan and that single payer was not the way to go. But it's not my positions that matter as much as my attitude. We have to, have to, have to attack Obama from the left. If we don't, he is seen as the far left and the whole spectrum shifts even further right than it already is.
If Obama is seen as the middle that helps him. So, even if you think Jane is crazy to team up with Grover Norquist and her attacks have no merit (you would be wrong on that, by the way), you have to send her a thank you note for making Obama look centrist. Rahm might not be happy about their target, but he has to be happy with how the politics of it plays out for the president.
But much more importantly, this isn't about Obama. This is about moving the spectrum. If there is no real and credible left-wing that fights back, then the entire political landscape gets pushed down to the right. This has huge policy implications, as we just saw in the health care fight.
Besides which, what do we have to lose? We lost the public option. We're going to lose on climate change (nearly a foregone conclusion at this point). Financial reform is terribly watered down and getting weaker by the minute. The war in Afghanistan has already been escalated, twice. Do I need to go on? This is what you get when there is no credible threat from the left.
Worst case scenario, Dean and Hamsher lose (I understand their tactics are entirely different, and in some ways I hate to lump them in together, but I do because they are among the few making real noise on the left), and they move the spectrum left and make other progressives look moderate. Best case scenario, they win! Dare we dream?
I know what some of you are thinking -- that's not the worst case scenario. The worst case is somehow their attacks on Obama help Republicans win. But if you buy into that, then you have to pack your bags and go home. That means you are never willing to forcefully challenge Obama out of the fear that it might somehow hurt him. While I'm sure he appreciates that, I can guarantee you that he will thank you by completely ignoring you (and your policy priorities). Asking politely is obviously not getting the job done.
"The Global War on Stealth Underwear"
Northwest Airlines Flight 253 sits on the runway after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport from Amsterdam on Christmas Day. Robert Scheer:
There is no “war” against terrorism. What George W. Bush launched and Barack Obama insists on perpetuating does not qualify. Not if by war one means doing the obvious and checking a highly suspicious air traveler’s underwear to see if explosives have been sewn in. If Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had put the stuff in his shoes we would have had him because that was tried before, but our government was too preoccupied with fighting unnecessary conventional wars and developing anti-missile defense systems to anticipate such a primitive delivery system.Howie P.S.: There can be no war on poverty or drugs, either.The explosives-laden underwear—worn by an airline passenger who had previously been flagged as a potentially dangerous fanatic, and who had paid cash for his ticket and had no checked luggage—was the terrorist’s weapon of choice, one that could have blown a hole in the side of Northwest Airlines’ Detroit-bound Flight 253 on Christmas Day, killing hundreds of innocents. But it is not a weapon to be effectively countered with the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American combat troops. Nor can it be stopped by the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of planes, subs and missiles in our arsenal of Cold War-era weapons, part of an annual defense budget that is higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time in the past half-century.The ballooning of the defense budget after 9/11 has proved a great boondoggle for the military-industrial complex, which suddenly found an excuse to build weapons and deploy conventional forces against a superpower enemy that no longer exists. But our stealth fighters and bombers designed to defeat Soviet defenses that were never built are a poor match against a terrorist’s stealth underwear.
In response to the 9/11 hijackers, armed with artillery that cost a couple hundred dollars at most, we threw money and, more important, attention at conventional military responses while neglecting the difficult police work and the intelligence evaluation and civilian-focused technology necessary to thwart homeland attacks. Yes, there are evildoers out there that mean us harm, as President Bush declaimed. But they are often the products of the best of Western education who, as examples ranging from the lead 9/11 hijackers – the Hamburg group—to the elite University College London-educated engineer in the latest incident demonstrate, move more easily in urbane Western societies than in Afghan villages.
The technology that could help detect a sophisticated plane hijacker or suicide bomber has been largely botched in development and only halfheartedly deployed even when it is available. On Tuesday, a devastating report in The Washington Post revealed that the full-body scanning equipment hyped after 9/11, which might have detected the explosives involved in last week’s incident, is still not in wide use. As the Post stated, “A plan that would have helped focus the development of better screening technology and procedures—including a risk-based assessment of aviation threats—is almost two years overdue, according to a report this fall by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.”
So, screening equipment that can detect plastic explosives exists, but it was not used in this case and, as the GAO predicted, “TSA cannot ensure that it is targeting the highest priority security needs at checkpoints; measure the extent to which deployed technologies reduce the risk of terrorist attacks; or make needed adjustments to its PSP [Passenger Screening Program] strategy.” As a result, the GAO concluded: “TSA lacks assurance that its investments in screening technologies address the highest priority security needs at airport passenger checkpoints.”
The “systematic failure” in the nation’s security that President Obama referred to Tuesday derives from the war metaphor itself and from the assumption, begun with Bush’s irrational invasion of Iraq and extended with Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan, that terrorism is a military rather than a criminal threat. The terrorists are not rebel fighters rooted, as are the Taliban and the remnants of the Iraq insurgency, in their homeland struggles and subject to being defeated on conventional battlefields.
Rather, they are rootless cosmopolitans of violence, alienated from any stated homeland and free to move easily about the world, armed in almost every instance with valid passports, visas and money to exploit our inability to seriously evaluate our own intelligence data. They can count on our top government officials ignoring blinking red warnings, as the Bush White House did before 9/11, or the alarm of a well-connected and properly concerned Nigerian banker-father.
Preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland has nothing to do with occupying vast tracts of land or winning the hearts and minds of backward villagers whom we falsely depict as surrogates of an evil empire, as we did in Vietnam and are now doing in Afghanistan. What is needed is smart police work to catch these highly mobile fanatics, and that begins with actually reading and then acting on the readily available intelligence data. It requires detectives with brains and not generals with firepower.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Edgy Moments in 2009: Wanda Sykes @ WH Correspondents' Dinner (video)
"Kill the Bill or Support Passage? A Debate on Healthcare Legislation Between Insurance Industry Critics" (with audio/video)
Democracy Now! with audio/video (18:56):
The progressive community is split over the $871 billion healthcare reform bill that passed the Senate last week. Some have lambasted the Senate for removing language that would have created a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. Others believe the Senate bill is the biggest expansion of federal healthcare guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid over four decades ago and should be supported as a first step toward reform. We host a debate.Congress might be in recess right now but the debate over the final shape of health care reform is far from over. The $871 billion Senate bill that passed last week still has to be reconciled with the House bill. Democrats are hoping to be able to present a final version for President Obama to sign by late January or early February.
Meanwhile the progressive community is split about what to push for. Some have lambasted the Senate for removing language that would have created a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. Others believe the Senate bill is the biggest expansion of federal healthcare guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid over four decades ago and should be supported as a first step toward reform.
Today we host a debate between two outspoken critics of the health insurance industry. Both support the overhaul of the nation’s health care system. But they disagree over whether or not to “kill the Senate bill.”
Jon Walker is a policy analyst at the website FireDogLake who’s been closely tracking health care reform debates. He believes the Senate bill is deeply flawed and writes, “This Senate bill is not a step forward for progressivism, it is a step backward. It is part of the transformation of all-important public social responsibilities into a privatized profit- making machine that lives off of government money won through a corrupt cycle of lobbying, campaign donations, and corporate giveaways.”
He joins me from Washington, DC.
Wendell Potter is a Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy. For 20 years he was a former executive at Cigna and Humana corporations, among the nation"s largest health insurers. Last year he left his job as head of communications for Cigna. Earlier this year he testified on the health insurance industry at a Senate committee hearing. In an op-ed published in the Huffington Post last week, he wrote, “It is tempting to join the "Kill the bill” folks, but it would amount to cutting off our noses to spite our faces." Wendell Potter joins us now from Philadelphia.
Jon Walker, policy analyst at the website Firedoglake
Wendell Potter, Senior Fellow on Health Care for the Center for Media and Democracy. For twenty years he was a former executive at CIGNA and Humana corporations, among the nation’s largest health insurers.
"Health Reform Subsidy Calculator"
Kaiser Family Foundation:
This tool illustrates premiums and government assistance under the types of reform proposals being considered in Congress for people under age 65 who purchase coverage on their own in an Exchange and are not covered through their employer, Medicare or Medicaid. While the proposals considered would not take effect for several years (2013 in the House and 2014 in the Senate), the results are presented in terms of 2009 premium and income levels to enable better comparisons to current circumstances. The tool allows the user to start with the provisions from one of several proposals and examine the impact at different income levels. Advanced settings allow users to change assumptions to show the effect of different policy choices.
A few caveats:
- Specific subsidies for cost sharing and what people might pay out-of-pocket for deductibles and coinsurance are not illustrated on the calculator.
- In many cases coverage will be more comprehensive and accessible than what is typically available today in the non-group market, so premiums cannot easily be compared to what people buying insurance on their own are now paying.
- The calculator does not apply to people with coverage available through an employer, where the firm is generally paying for a substantial portion of the insurance premium.
Choose a proposal Enter income as: Dollars % of poverty Enter annual income here: Enter age of policyholder here (19-64): Choose family type here: Is employer coverage available?
For more information: A side-by-side comparison of Congressional health reform proposals and a brief explaining how subsidies work are availableSource: Kaiser Family Foundation calculations.H/t to Daily Kos.
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